According to the online Der Spiegel, northern Holland has been hit by “a widespread blackout” since earlier this morning.
The flagship German news magazine writes that major infrastructure, such as the capital Amsterdam and its international airport Schiphol and rail system, have been severely impacted.” Spiegel cites a report from Holland’s daily “AD” (formerly the “Algemeen Dagblad”.
The ad.nl site itself reports the power failure was caused by a fault at a high-voltage station in Diemen.”The station is one that handles 380,000 volts.” This would likely mean that its part of the power transmission system.
According to Spiegel (my emphasis):
The ‘AD’ newspaper reports that there was possibly an explosion at the station. According to Reuters news agency, grid operator Tennet attributed the outage to an overload of the power grid.”
The Dutch news site reports that fire departments and police officers have been mobilized to free people from stopped elevators and to beef up security in and around Amsterdam.
According to the reports, a Tennet spokesman says that power is being restored slowly and expects it to be in full service soon.
The question that remains unanswered is why the station exploded and why there was a “power grid overload”, as grid operator Tennet reported. Looking at neighboring German wind power feed in, we see there was a modest 4-gigawatt input surge of wind energy occurring early this morning between 3 and 4 a.m. That’s like four regular power plants coming online, or 1000 large wind turbines. But such fluctuations are becoming routine, and so it is probably unrelated.
=============================
ASIDE:
And now here’s something totally unrelated to Holland power. Hat-tip: Bishop Hill
My computer is still working, so no black out in the centre of Amsterdam. I have no idea where my electricity comes from. Perhaps in the future from the planned wind mill park in the North Sea. Hopefully, our cabinet falls before the summer and the whole thing is forgotten by then.
“I have no idea where my electricity comes from.”
Maybe Netherlands has, like Germany, built up a network of small gas-powered cogen plants, size of a commuter car engine, 50 kW class, very efficient, providing city blocks with heat and electricity at the same time and feeding in surplus electricity. Honda and VW offer such units derived from their ordinary 4 stroke motors, refitted for Natgas.
No, it likely is related. Some speculation here: Germany tried to shed the load to Holland, as at that time of morning they couldn’t deal with it in Germany. Ohms Law says that if you can’t get rid of the current, the voltage must go up, overloading the switch-yard at Diemen. The 380,000 volts is probably DC. They use those kinds of DC voltage for long distance transmission to reduce losses. There are large capacitors involved, for filtering and phase adjustment. These are oil-filled, and can really “go bang” when they arc over.
Sorry, but other sources are reporting it the other way round:
“Der Netzbetreiber TenneT gab an, ein technisches Problem im Hochspannungswerk des Amsterdamer Vorortes Diemen habe zu einer Überlastung des Stromnetzes geführt und den Ausfall verursacht.”
(“overload, BECAUSE of the problems at a transmission station”)
http://www.wiwo.de/unternehmen/energie/tennet-stromausfall-legte-niederlande-zeitweise-lahm/11565804.html
Tennet is not giving a reason:
http://www.tennet.eu/de/home.html
and i do not see any atypical spike in German alternative power (nor would this have an effect onthe north of netherlands?!?)
http://www.agora-energiewende.de/service/aktuelle-stromdaten/?tx_agoragraphs_agoragraphs%5BinitialGraph%5D=powerGeneration&tx_agoragraphs_agoragraphs%5Bcontroller%5D=Graph
Thanks, I merely quoted Spiegel, and so there seems to be some confusion about the cause. WIWO report sounds plausible, though, as there was no huge spike in wind energy, just as I mentioned in my post. Spiegel changed its article radically since I posted. In the end, the power outage was caused by an overload, and so the result is the same.
Also see Ed’s comment above.
no problem, the news were saying different things yesrerday morning and it was actually a day with strange wind conditions.
Huh !? What happened to all of the ‘reliable’ wind and solar power ? /s
the netherlands are actually lagging behind on wind power, struggling to achieve the EU target:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_Netherlands
Last year here in Scotland (blighted by useless windmills), we had some power outages.
Just as with Spiegels’ story line above, the reasons for the outages were changed quite a few times over the following days.
As we get more and more intermittent sources of electricity, it stands to reason that the transmission systems will be unable to cope in their present form.
Naturally the Orwellian Ministry of Truth must take its time to inform the peasants with a plausible story.
Tennet, serving northern Germany is one of the grids with the most windpower and is claiming to have 99.999% service security.
http://www.tennet.eu/de/home.html
“is claiming to have 99.999% service security. ”
Well what they mean is, yes, the wires work. Whether the wind turbines deliver too much or too little is none of their business. They are the grid operator.
This free education brought to you by logic and reason.